September 2009 browser stats: IE sees biggest drop yet

Internet Explorer saw its largest-ever drop as Firefox and the rest of the …

Another month, another set of data that shows the main browser usage trend is unchanged: though its lead remains large, Internet Explorer is still losing ground to all other browsers. Firefox is steadily gaining, Safari remains in a nonthreatening third place, Chrome is happily carving out a small niche for itself, and poor Opera can't seem to budge from fifth place. In September, all browsers except for IE showed positive growth. In fact, IE experienced the biggest drop in recent memory.

Between September and August, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 1.26 percentage points (from 66.97 percent to 65.71 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.77 percentage points (from 22.98 percent to 23.75 percent). Safari increased 0.17 percentage points (from 4.07 percent to 4.24 percent) while Chrome once again moved further away from Opera: it gained a worthy 0.33 percentage points (from 2.84 percent to 3.17 percent). Opera budged 0.15 percentage points (from 2.04 percent to 2.19 percent). Although IE's decline seems to be unceasing, the real shame is that the old versions have more share than the newer ones (we can only hope that when Windows 7 becomes generally available this month, we will see this trend reverse). The only tidbit of good news we have for developers is that IE6 has finally dropped below the one quarter mark:

You can see the market share pie for September 2009, according to Net Applications, at the top of this post. The graph just above shows how things at Ars are very different: Firefox continues to dominate, but the default browsers for Windows and Mac OS X still show their strength, and Chrome's lead over Opera is much more significant at Ars. Compared to last month, IE lost share, but so did Firefox. Safari and Chrome gained, and Opera's share remained unchanged. Safari made significant gains with Snow Leopard's release, so it's possible that Internet Explorer will once Windows 7 is out.